Friday, 31 October 2008

About 6 weeks back I discovered the wonderful wonderful talent ofIrene Tan who has a brilliant blog full of new and exciting techniques. I thought I would try a few out. I worked on this Lo for 6 days, and then before I had finished it Irene was chosen as a guest for Pencil Lines. Rather dispiriting for me she said in her interview that a LO takes her from 1.5 to 2 hours! I was still working on mine so I was a bit reluctant to share. I really am pleased with the result though so here it is for me to crow!

Use a large square of scrap paper to make a mask to create large square frame with distress inks, remove mask and straighten/highlight edges by ruling and marking with black pen.I turned the photo to B&W in order to enhance it a bit as it is a poor 1980's photo. I then stamped using stayzon and the AL swirly stamps and distressed edges with more of the vintage photo ink.I used the chipboard swirl as a template for my sewing, and used the herringbone stitch shown on Irene's blog to 'fill in' with sewing floss, adding some seed beads as I went.I readied the flower by taking it apart and only using three layers. I enhanced it using glossy accents to make faux water drops and to glue on sequins. Then I stamped some more of the AL swirls where I was going to position the flower. Once it was dry I attached the large flower in the middle of the swirls with a brad through the centre.The hearts were matted onto brown fabric at the back and then on the front more of the AL stamps were stamped onto the hearts and then I doodled with the white suffle pen.I inked the edges of the journal box and slipped under the corner of the photo.Once the brown paint had dried on the wooden flowers I used a larger AL's stamp to emboss white swirls over the letters.HUGS was made by printing out the letters onto spare paper, carefully cutting them out to leave a stencil of the work. I then used the stencil and more Vintage distressing ink to form the letters and then the large background script stamp over the stencil to decorate the title. I used the suffle pen to hand script the word love and to highlight some of the swirls by the flower with doodles.Finally to add a little balance and to fill the corner space I added the fibre bow through two eyelets and to write my journalling.